Title: "Mable Jiang, Partner at Multicoin Capital: A Look at the Web3 Labor Market from the Perspective of On-Chain Reputation Systems"

Author: Mable Jiang, Partner at Multicoin Capital
Compiler: Noc, Rhythm BlockBeats

This article summarizes the views of Mable Jiang, a partner at Multicoin Capital, shared on her personal social media platform, organized by Rhythm as follows:

In 2020, when I saw DAOhaus, I thought, "Wow, this is cool. Maybe in the future, people can browse all these different kinds of DAOs and choose to participate in the projects/jobs they like. Their contributions will be paid in tokens, just like developers picking projects on Gitcoin."

But I also had some questions: If there are a thousand or ten thousand DAOs on the market, how will people find what they want to do? If people cannot filter and find projects or plans they are interested in within a short time, then the demand will also become weak.

Similarly, if a plan or project has a large number of users joining, can it really accept all applicants without any filtering? If a filtering mechanism is to be implemented, how should the barriers for filtering be set? The expanding team needs to "fully understand the members joining the team" and recognize the differences among various labor forces.

In March 2021, I met Harry Zhang, co-founder of Project Galaxy, and my intuition told me that Project Galaxy could become a killer protocol, but I didn't know what "Web3 labor market" really meant. To get this project approved, I crafted a theory about "Web3 LinkedIn" for the investment committee, and despite others being quite skeptical about the project, I ultimately pushed for the investment.

At that time, Project Galaxy was just an NFT-as-a-service platform, not yet the "on-chain reputation/certification protocol" it is today. The play-to-earn game Axie Infinity had not yet become the global sensation it is now.

The project team did not know how to find suitable members for their target community, and people had no channels to learn about job opportunities that suited them.

Soon in the summer, the "Shadowy Super Coder" event held by Project Galaxy inspired me. Projects aimed at developers needed to attract more developers to try their products, so they offered additional incentives/product trial packages to target users—smart contract developers found through on-chain indexing—in hopes of attracting a large number of developers to try the related products.

This sounds like the simplest thing in the Web2 world, like Google or Facebook ads targeting users for promotion. Although the Galaxy team merely indexed and organized on-chain data to determine the target audience, this was the first time in history that tasks were assigned to addresses based on on-chain reputation!

Also in the summer, more P2E games emerged like mushrooms after rain. Then we saw various guilds appearing in these games, with people starting to join one guild, then turning to other guilds, or serving several guilds simultaneously.

At this point, guilds entered a red ocean (the red ocean refers to all existing industries, i.e., known market space, where industry boundaries are already defined, and companies strive to beat competitors to capture a larger share of the existing market, leading to fierce competition). The trend of guilds becoming increasingly segmented and specialized is almost inevitable, or some guilds may disappear due to a lack of differentiation. The supply side of the labor market is layered, and guilds focusing on specific tasks may perform exceptionally well due to specialization.

The current market demand is for so-called "play-to-earn" games, but in the future, it will be abstracted into various "X-to-earn" tasks. In the words of token maximizers, it’s all about using "proof of work (POW)" to exchange tokens or shares within the community.

It is clear that guilds have a strong demand for operational management systems (which is why we invested in one), and if guilds are to specialize, each guild task category will require different management modules. Then, these tasks can seek suitable labor from the right guilds.

But how do guilds recruit individuals? It finally dawned on me why I referred to Project Galaxy as on-chain LinkedIn seven months ago: individuals can query any credentials they want to showcase to guilds and customize them into on-chain resumes.

If a guild's operating system integrates Galaxy, then any task completed within that operating system-managed guild can be converted into publicly queryable badges or credentials. These past task experiences will help users apply for their next new tasks.

An even more exciting feature is that if a person has certain relevant credentials at a specific address in the past (not necessarily in collaboration with the guild), they can customize their past work credentials (resume) according to the specific guild's requirements to quickly lock in tasks or jobs that match their own qualifications.

I also see the potential for guilds to become more specialized (which I believe is verticalization), while some guilds become more horizontal—that is, focusing on part-time tasks.

Moreover, not all Web3 tasks are simple; some tasks require coordination. Community Gaming serves as a coordination layer for metaverse tasks/events. Today it allows competition between guilds (i.e., tournaments), and tomorrow it may allow more complex collaborations between guilds.

Finally, I found that case studies around Fiverr and Upwork are particularly enlightening for building thoughts around the Web3 labor market.

Fiverr layers tasks on the platform into more standardized task opportunities. The benefit of this approach is that it can organize fragmented tasks, but the downside is that it can only be limited to simpler or less customized part-time tasks.

Upwork is a site used by large companies to post contractor tasks. It looks more like Amazon or Taobao, where people need to pay to post their resumes for opportunities. There is no layered structure because the task content becomes more personalized or focused on specific requirements.

In the Web3 world, Fiverr-type tasks may directly utilize individual labor without going through guilds, while Upwork-type tasks may be more easily completed on a large scale through guilds over a continuous period.

At this point, this rambling conversation comes to an end. Today's Web3 labor market, for me, consists of a layer of credential reputation, an organizational layer of labor supply and demand, and a cross-organizational coordination layer. Of course, the Web3 world is still continuously updating and evolving, and I hope to gain more insights.

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